If there is such a thing as actually abusing a child through excessive generosity and overindulgence, then Lena Dunham’s parents are child abusers. Her father, Carroll Dunham, is a painter noted for his primitive brand of highbrow pornography, his canvases anchored by puffy neon-pink labia; her photographer mother filled the family home with nude pictures of herself, “legs spread defiantly.” Self-styled radicals from old money, they were not the sort of people inclined to enforce even the most lax of boundaries. And they were, in their daughter’s telling, enablers of some very disturbing behavior that would be considered child abuse in many jurisdictions — Lena Dunham’s sexual abuse, specifically, of her younger sister, Grace, the sort of thing that gets children taken away from non-millionaire families without Andover pedigrees and Manhattanite social connections. Dunham writes of casually masturbating while in bed next to her younger sister, of bribing her with “three pieces of candy if I could kiss her on the lips for five seconds . . . anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl I was trying.” At one point, when her sister is a toddler, Lena Dunham pries open her vagina — “my curiosity got the best of me,” she offers, as though that were an explanation. “This was within the spectrum of things I did.”

The evidence includes admissions from top health officials that the epidemic included multiple strains of the virus, and that it appeared simultaneously in multiple independent locations.

The question can be settled if federal researchers study the genetic fingerprint of the EV-D68 viruses that first hit kids in Colorado, Missouri and Illinois to see if they are close relatives to the EV-D68 viruses found in Central America.

So far, that virus has been found in nine American kids who died from illness, has apparently inflicted unprecedented polio-like paralysis in roughly 50 kids, and has put hundreds of young American kids into hospital emergency wards and intensive care units throughout more than 40 states.

Friday, October 31, 2014

They were together in the House.Just the two of them. It was a cold, dark, stormy night. The storm had come quickly and each time the thunder boomed he watched her jump.

She looked across the room and admired his strong appearance....and wished that he would take her in his arms, comfort her and protect her from the storm.

Suddenly, with a pop, the power went out.... She screamed.. He raced to the sofa where she was cowering. He didn't hesitate to pull her into his arms.. He knew this was a forbidden union and expected her to pull back.He was surprised when she didn't resist but instead clung to him. The storm raged on....

They knew it was wrong...Their families would never understand... So consumed were they in their FEAR that they heard no opening of doors... just the faint click of a camera......

The song is childhood favorite of mine. It appeared on Disney's 1963 "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." I like the zydeco accompaniment. There's an earlier version of the same song sung by Bing Crosby:

Thurl Ravenscroft's voice, familiar to many as the voice of Tony The Tiger ("They're Grrrreat") also sang the songs in "The Grinch Who Stole Christmas" (that was not Boris Karloff). Ravenscroft's voice still narrates the train ride at Disneyland.

Our president is an excellent barrytone. I wonder if he could do a Thurl Ravenscroft impression?

'And so what we have to do is send a collective voice,' he said of the upcoming midterm elections. 'Everything we're doing is God's work: education, healthcare, affordable housing, [protecting against] discrimination, paying people the minimum wage.' Charlie Rangel (D-N.Y.)

"Consequently there was a long period during which nearly every thinking man was in some sense a rebel, and usually a quite irresponsible rebel. Literature was largely the literature of revolt or of disintegration. Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, Shelley, Byron, Dickens, Stendhal, Samuel Butler, Ibsen, Zola, Flaubert, Shaw, Joyce — in one way or another they are all of them destroyers, wreckers, saboteurs. For two hundred years we had sawed and sawed and sawed at the branch we were sitting on. And in the end, much more suddenly than anyone had foreseen, our efforts were rewarded, and down we came. But unfortunately there had been a little mistake. The thing at the bottom was not a bed of roses after all, it was a cesspool full of barbed wire."

Lauren Hill is here for all of us. She's a soul engine, and all she wants to do for the rest of her life is remind us how good we have it, and that we need to make that goodness matter, for everyone. That would include kids with the cancer she has, which is inoperable and incurable and swiftly fatal and receives very little attention.

She is a shy young lady, rapidly emerging from her shell, to advise us that lives don't have to be lived long to be lived triumphantly. Hers is an impossibly sad story. But only if we choose to look at it that way. Lauren doesn't.

"I told (God) I'd take every opportunity to speak for the kids who can't speak," she says.

"The GoPro production crew travel to the Marum Crater on Ambrym Island in Vanuatu to join adventurer photographers Geoff Mackley and Bradley Ambrose, the first people to set foot at the edge of a boiling lava lake, and stare into the lifeblood that connects our home planet."

“How did I go from law-abiding citizen to a life of crime?” Kuhn says, grinning. One night a bartender took him into a backroom, where a local jewel thief was nursing a graze from a bullet. The man told Kuhn that he had just been shot by a police officer while trying to rob a coin store; he dared Kuhn to finish the job. “I climbed up the building and found the hole in the roof that Johnny had cut,” Kuhn recalls. “I went down a rope and I cleaned the place out. It was just truly a thrill.” He had been earning $100 a day with tips at the Casablanca; a few days later he claims he was handed an envelope containing $180,000. “I’ve always been adventurous,” he says. (read more)

Wednesday, October 29, 2014

Says Rice of the recent leak of some unnamed White House advisor, "The relationship is not in crisis. In many respects the relationship is stronger than it's ever been."Ricespeak is easy to translate. She speaks in reverse.Translation: U.S. Israeli relations is in crisis, it's never been worse.

Plant the tallest plant in the middle and smaller plants around it. What could be easier! The big plant is called the centerpiece.

A centerpiece can be any type of plant as long as it remains taller than the surrounding plants for the life of the arrangement. Choose a plant that is full, or combine several tall, skinny plants together so the centerpiece doesn't look too skinny. Be sure the centerpiece like the same growing conditions (light, temperature, water) as the smaller plants going around it.

Pamela Crawford Easy Container Combos: Vegetables and Flowers pg. 72

Example: Lavender centerpiece, ornamental kale, violas

[The lavender looks like rosemary to me. It will grow much taller, I expect, with purple spikes and this arrangement will look very different then, less balanced than now.]

_____________________

Thomas Hobbs:

Really good gardeners don't hold back. Mesmerizing memorable plant pictures are created by the brave. Spines, teeth, spikes, thorns, and even seed capsules add an edginess to plant compositions. "Safe" gardeners rely on flowers alone and leave theatricality out of it. Gardening is a chance to spread your wings -- why do so many people never fly?

Beware of the botanical quicksand sold as "annuals." This huge industry dispenses humdrum goop like "supertunias" and the insanely popular bacopa (Suteria cordata). This trailing, white-flowered annual is the botanical equivalent of icicle lights -- so overused and trite it has lost any attractiveness through overexposure. The discerning eye learns to avoid most popular plants. Why be like everyone else?

In a mixed planting, never put the tallest plant in the center of the pot. Doing that immediately gives one away as artless. If a pot is to be seen from all sides, plant three tall things, in the middle instead of one, They don't all have to be the same, either. Try combining a young New Zealand flax (a Phormium cultivar of your choice), a bronze Carex Flagellifera and a dark-leaved dahlia such as 'Bednall Beauty' or 'Ellen Houston'. This is much more visually interesting than a green dracaena 'spike' (Cordyline australis), the last refuge of the truly desperate.

Paul Kitterman, 53, "had his fill of football and decided to take a walk" in the middle of Thursday's game against the San Diego Chargers, said police in Pueblo, Colorado, where he was eventually found.

He "even mentioned disposing of his Broncos hat as he did not want to be recognized," police said.

In the meantime, Kitterman's mystified family filed a police report about his disappearance, noting that he did not have a cellphone or credit cards with him.

“It’s hard to say why it’s coming together now except that everybody realizes that the longer we wait the less people will be around to know Orson’s wishes,” said Frank Marshall, 68, who was a line producer on “The Other Side of the Wind.” “Everybody recognizes that it’s the last chance.” Mr. Marshall — who was also a producer for Steven Spielberg — tried for years with Mr. Bogdanovich to get the picture completed.

“They figured out a way to get everybody involved,” said Mr. Karp, the author. “Their effort is incredible. The last few years of this have been so fraught with so many deals that didn’t happen because people screwed up in the last minute.”

“It took the right people to come along,” she said. “They wanted to talk to me and did not want any outsiders. Until now this movie has been under lock and key under French law. I had the good fortune to be able to protect it. When we talked, we laughed and joked. It was just this amazing rapport. What came through to me was their true love of art.” (read more)

The New York Post, citing law enforcement sources, reported that Dr. Craig Spencer initially told investigators that he had self-quarantined in his Harlem apartment. According to the paper, Spencer's story fell apart after investigators checked his credit-card statement and information from his Metrocard.

I don't mean to continually harp on Ebola, but, this is precisely the problem with the "self monitoring" policy that the Obama administration favors. Didn't Duncan, patient zero, lied to the admitting nurse at the Dallas Hospital? Even after he was admitted.

People lie, other people get infected... Ok, that doesn't rime but it does make sense. It's not too much to ask of people, who already know about the consequences of treating Ebola, to take the extra step necessary to ensure that they are not infected. end of rant.

The list also includes descriptions such as "recalcitrant, myopic, reactionary, obtuse, blustering, pompous, and 'Aspergery,' " according to Goldberg.

“The bad thing about him is that he won’t do anything to reach an accommodation with the Palestinians or with the Sunni Arab states," the official said. "The only thing he’s interested in is protecting himself from political defeat. He’s not [Yitzhak] Rabin, he’s not [Ariel] Sharon, he’s certainly no [Menachem] Begin. He’s got no guts."

The White House is leaking fast and furious... see what I did there?... Never mind.

If that's what they think of Netanyahu, I can't wait to hear what they think of Putin.

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Take all the doctors/nurses/other health care workers that are US citizens working in Africa and put them in a cheap hotel the US government purchased in some city in Nigeria or Sierra Leone or Liberia.

Why not make a luxury resort instead? Show some respect. The hitch would be a faithful quarantine period before returning.

It isn’t clear what the FDA will do. But whatever the agency decides, doctors will still be able to prescribe the drugs “off-label.” And for many men, the benefits of boosting testosterone levels, a condition often referred to as low-T, are worth the risk.

“Men all want to feel younger and more virile, and they somehow have come to believe that low-T medication is the fountain of youth. But we don’t know whether it’s safe,” says Steven Nissen, chairman of cardiovascular medicine at the Cleveland Clinic.

Testosterone is a male steroid hormone that rises sharply when boys hit puberty. It affects the entire body—voices deepen, shoulders broaden, sperm production begins, and height, strength and sex drive all increase. Levels peak in the early 30s and decline gradually, about 1% a year, as men age. (read the whole thing)

“This happened multiple times with multiple selections. Every time my choice flipped from Republican to Democrat. Sometimes it required four or five tries to get the ‘x’ to stay on my real selection,” the Frederick, Md., resident said last week."

Is a snug outfit conducive to better playing I wonder.

Top YouTube comment...it is amazing how in 2 centuries, music has regressed to the likes of justin bieber and one direction. you would thought human evolution would be able to produce much better than that.

One bright early summer day a four-year old tow-headed boy, a neighbor of my parents, walked right into my parents house through the open back patio door with his little hands tightly cupped. Seeing me sitting inside he asked me, "You wanna see a calipitter?"

Monday, October 27, 2014

“Congress doesn’t pass laws anymore. Not really. Not the kind of individual laws where I can go to a representative or a senator and explain what the law would mean, pro or con, to my client. Nowadays they’re burying all the laws inside gigantic fuzzy bills.”

“Congress is punting legislation to regulators. Congress feels less inclined to get the facts. That ball is in the hands of the regulatory agency receivers.”

Eric told me about a case with which a fellow lobbyist had to cope. McDonalds wanted universal nutritional restaurant menu labeling. If Mickey D ain’t happy, ain’t nobody going to be happy. What Big Mac wanted Big Mac got, buried somewhere in the paper pyramid that is Obamacare and worded as clumsily as Joe Biden remark.

The FDA was left to decide what a “restaurant” is. The FDA said anyplace where 50 percent of square footage was devoted to preparing and serving food. Eric’s friend had go to a hearing and explain that this definition would eliminate the nation’s delis, commissaries, and school cafeterias. As a dimwit consumer affairs reporter put it to Eric’s friend, “Oh, I never thought of that.”

Eric said, “I meet with regulatory agencies. But they don’t answer to voters. They don’t answer to anybody. I go in by myself, and they’ve got twenty agency employees at the table with a dozen others calling in by speakerphone. It’s more like testifying in court than lobbying.”

I asked him, “Isn’t there some growing, sort of libertarian, anti-regulatory feeling in the country?”

He said, “I’d agree if Congress had done anything about the IRS. Basically congress’s attitude is ‘Who gives a shit about business owners? They dealt with this before. They’ll deal with it again.’”

“Maybe,” he said, “the pendulum swings on things like regulation. But gerrymandering has cold cocked the pendulum weight, stopped it dead. ‘He was elected for being too far right.’ ‘She was elected for being too far left.’ Not much room for me to get in there and sway opinion. I’ve stopped putting regulatory reform on my agenda.”

“How many of these problems,” I ask, “are unintended consequences of lobbying reform laws?”

“Intended consequences,” Eric said. “All we can do now is have our industry give money to campaigns. I’ll go in for a meeting with a congressman who isn’t even listening, and the next day I’ll get a call from his campaign fund-raisers wanting to know what my client will donate. I spend more time on fund-raising than on issue influencing. They don’t even need the money. The incumbent is going to get re-elected. It’s just, ‘I’ve got more money, so I’ve got more credibility.’ This is a shell of the lobbying industry. All we are is ATM machines in pinstripe suits.”

Money spent on lobbying itself (as opposed to campaign contributions) is declining, down almost 9 percent since 2010. Advocacy group lobbying has held on but lobbyists for private enterprise aren’t getting a grip. E.g., the U.S. Chamber of Commerce spent $136.3 million lobbying in 2012 and $74.7 million in 2013. The number of registered lobbyists peaked in 2007 at 14,838.This year it’s 11,079.

And don’t for a moment think any of that is good news.

I skipped the first half, the comical half of this article. You can go ahead and read the whole thing if you want. PJ is a good writer.

“They’re going after people who are really not criminals,” said David Smith, a former federal prosecutor who is now a forfeiture expert and lawyer in Virginia. “They’re middle-class citizens who have never had any trouble with the law.”

The practice has swept up dairy farmers in Maryland, an Army sergeant in Virginia saving for his children’s college education and Ms. Hinders, 67, who has borrowed money, strained her credit cards and taken out a second mortgage to keep her restaurant going. (read the whole thing)

Chat roulette, connects users from around the world randomly for conversation. Either party can end the chat at any time. Cannot see myself doing any such thing. It's just asking to be flashed.

That was the fun bit.

This is the un-fun bit.

This is the other god on earth, Bill Gates in 1998 when Microsoft was accused of violating Sherman Anti-Trust in applying monopoly power by incorporating Explorer browser into Microsoft operating system, alleged to have been instrumental in Microsoft's Explorer replacing Netscape for dominance in the browser marketplace. Eroded later by other browsers as the browser wars continued. By way of reminder, we all lived this.

But we didn't actually see the testimony.

It appears to me Gates is doing all that is possible to obfuscate, in jaded impatient world-weary way and the questioner is out of his depth. In my opinion Gates comes off as a tech support guys goofing on the questioner's inability to form precise technical questions. He is obviously trolling.

Example:

Gates: I'm not getting your question. Are you asking me what I was thinking when I wrote this sentence?

Lawyer: Let me begin with that, what were you thinking when you wrote that sentence?

Gates: I don't specifically remember writing this sentence.

Lawyer: Since you don't have an answer for that question, let me ask you a different question.

Gates: No, I have an answer. The answer is I don't remember.

Lawyer: You don't remember what you meant. Let me try to ask you…

Gates: … I don't remember what I was thinking.

Lawyer: Is there a difference between remembering what you were thinking and remembering what you meant?

Gates: If the question is what I mean when I wrote it, "no."

And so on, for hours, this part 9 of 12.

It appears to others Gates resembles Kermit the frog, but I am not seeing that.

Sunday, October 26, 2014

I don't think the sorts of people who need to see the following connection even read here. But here it is.

Point 1:

t-man said...
Chickenlittle -
The trouble is that the people who were willfully blind about Obama before the election and supported him, all thought, and still think, that they are far more intelligent that those who opposed Obama. Their self image depends upon perceived intellectual superiority, and it will be extremely difficult for them to admit to themselves that they were wrong.The best chance it to give these people an excuse - "I was misled by the media" is the best option here. This is one of the reasons I think that the Breitbart assault on the mainstream media is so dangerous to Obama.9/26/09, 12:19 PM

The link goes to Althouse's comments, so don't shoot me if you hate her site. But note the early date.

Point 2 is the Sharyl Attkisson book, for example here. She offers a "how" -- a mechanism -- for what many have long suspected for those who will listen to her.

She also offers an out for those who won't listen too: she gives them t-man's "best chance" -- the excuse: "I was misled by the media."

Chris Squire played bass guitar for "Yes." Before that he was in band called "Syn" which nobody has heard of. In this interview, Squire tells the story of the night Syn went to play London's Marquee Club to open for a band called "Cliff Bennet & The Rebel Rousers" -- a band which never showed up. Instead, a new act with a black guitarist replaced them.

It's amusing how candid and honest Squire is. Hendrix was the first black man he'd met -- and he was so amicable. Squire takes a professional dig at Noel Redding (whom no one seems to have liked). Listen through because the story gets better when he still hadn't figured out what was going on and, going on stage as the opening act for Hendrix, he met a front row audience which included Steve Winwood, Pete Townshend, Keith Richards, and George Harrison -- "all of my heroes."

I found this video of Hendrix playing the Marquee Club around that time -- not the same night -- he did four shows on different dates in addition to this special filmed show -- but it's close enough in time to approximate the person whom all of Britain's "guitarati" came to see that night (this was still months before Jimi's American debut at Monterrey in June of that year).

What I really wanted to know what how to cook a chicken on the grill without burning the outside and having blood at the bone. That was much harder to pin down. It seemed like everyone wanted to show me how to cut the chicken flat but everyone seemed to assume that "smoke the chicken" was self-explanatory.

“The perfume of 67P/C-G is quite strong, with the odor of rotten eggs (hydrogen sulfide), horse stable (ammonia), and the pungent, suffocating odor of formaldehyde. This is mixed with the faint, bitter, almond-like aroma of hydrogen cyanide,” Kathrin Altwegg, head of the ROSINA project at the Center for Space and Habitability (CSH) at the University of Bern, described the smell. “Add some whiff of alcohol (methanol) to this mixture, paired with the vinegar-like aroma of sulfur dioxide and a hint of the sweet aromatic scent of carbon disulfide, and you arrive at the ‘perfume’ of our comet”.

Moondance. The song no other singer has ever covered as well as Van Morrison originally sang. Moondance may be the first Van Morrison song you remember hearing. Was it? Or was Brown Eyed Girl?

If you performed a song at every concert for decades, you 'd probably change it up, if for no reason just to end the boredom doing the same thing over and over and over. Van does that, and the changes almost always move a song away from rock and into jazz or blues. Here's a newer, and far more jazzier version of Moondance.

Comments to the joke are not helpful, they all assume the name is known. The one clue available is the phrase, "an enormous cream cracker behind the settee." But first, what is a cream cracker? And why is named "cream" when it has no cream in it? (named for the method of creaming the ingredients).

Turns out to be Thora Hird. The cream cracker refers to a play that won awards, a monologue that became popular, about a woman who cleans obsessively and falls while retrieving a cracker behind a settee and injures herself. Seeking help she crawls to the front door where a policeman responds and asks why the darkness behind her, and instead of asking for help she tells him she was napping, then she painfully crawls back inside. Throughout the woman recalls her past, incidents and characters, the death of her own baby that might have been caused by her obsessive cleaning, the monologue characterized by contrast between sadness and humor. Bennett's plays usually conclude bleakly so it is assumed that she died.

Looking through Google Images I notice among all the serious pictures somebody has uploaded something so ridiculous that I crack up laughing at the prankster who would produce it; the dame Thora Hird being drawn upstairs by home stair elevator system in a bucket shaped as Dalek. Who would do such a thing? Wikipedia informs us Thora preformed in a wheelchair near the end of her life.

Why, that Darlek lift is just silly. Possibly mean-spirited.

So I tapped on the picture, visited the page and was delivered to Thora Hird's Twitter account. She did it herself! And at this point due to the Dalek lift she's become interesting. I read through her tweets. Here are a few.

*@BlueCasket if we're all God's children, whats so special about Jesus?

The account devolves to pope bashing as it goes further back meaning that's how the account starts out. I'm becoming wary reading at a string of some 10 or so similar tweets. This is not feeling right.

*Tweeting from the great beyond. Bloody boring up here!

What? No. Wait, what?

Check dates:

Shit.

It's not her. She died March 2003, this account was opened 2010. Twitter is crap for allowing this.

See how socialists are? They usurp dead peoples' identities and leave it for you to discover as they put all sorts of ridiculous anti-religion, anti-capitalist, nonsense in other peoples' mouths. They vote on behalf of dead people since the dead aren't around anymore to do it themselves. It is what they would have wanted, surely. And their fixation on Daily Mail is the same as American liberals' fixation of Fox. That was fun, but much less so now that I know I've been tricked into reading a bunch of anti-Catholic bullshit that Thora herself would not say. Bad show there, taking such time, care, talent and effort for speaking ill through the dead.